British daily on Pakistan’s success against the Taliban
LONDON, Nov 16 (APP)- A leading British daily has said that Pakistan’s military success in Swat and Malakand region has shown that the Taliban are not invincible and that it is possible to fight a counter-insurgency against them and win.
In his article in ‘Daily Mail’
titled ‘Why Pakistan is winning its war against the Taliban’, David
Rose wrote that skirmishes continue in outlying areas and there is
still a curfew. But the progress is unmistakable. “When I last visited Pakistan in
June, at the height of the Swat campaign, there were more than two
million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living on the scorching
plains in camps and relatives” spare rooms. “But a remarkably efficient
army-led transport and reconstruction effort has meant more than 95 per
cent of them have been back home for weeks. More impressive is the fact
that despite having been IDPs, and in many cases having once been in
favour of the Taliban, few Swat people appear to want them back.” Recalling his latest visit, Rose
wrote that in Mingora, the city of 250,000 people that was until
recently the headquarters of Pakistan’s Swat valley Taliban, the
shopping centre is heaving. “Bloody Chowk”, the crossroads
where the militants used to leave the butchered bodies of their victims
every night, is once again merely a mini-roundabout, surrounded by
camera and shoe shops. “Further up the valley, a
scenically idyllic 100-mile seam of fertility dividing the Northwest
Frontier mountains, the girls” schools that were blown up by the
Taliban are reopening, with lessons taking place in tents. “The barbers ordered to stop
shaving beards on pain of death are back in business, and Mullah FM,
the radio station used by the Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah to
broadcast his extremist sermons, is off the air”. According to the writer, the
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has repeatedly urged the Pakistanis
to ‘do more’, claiming that three-quarters of terrorist plots in
Britain have links to Pakistan. “Yet last week he also admitted
that, across the Afghan border, some of the territory the British Army
took at such terrible cost last summer is already back under Taliban
control.” Drawing parallel between
Pakistan’s success in Swat and NATO’s failure across the border , he
wrote the very reasons Pakistan appears to be doing quite well, both in
Swat and in the current military operation further south in Waziristan,
make the prospects of NATO’s success in Afghanistan more remote. “Moreover, one of the Pakistanis’
evident strengths a clear strategic focus with operations of limited
scope that tackle the enemy one area at a time is woefully lacking in
Afghanistan.”
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